Unexpected Uses for Pocket Fan

I envisioned Pocket Fan to be a novelty app. What else would you call an app that displayed an animated fan? It certainly wasn’t supposed to be useful. My perception changed when I got this comment on the Android Market:

Can’t sleep without the sound of a fan. This is almost perfect for power outages. Just needs to stay open and not black screen after 1 minute.

When I first read that comment, I thought to myself “He can just set his screen to never time out…” and went back to work on my game. Then I saw a post on reddit entitled “I can’t sleep unless you’re near me…”. It was just a picture of a box fan, but it all clicked for me then. Pocket Fan could be used as a sound machine or noise generator.

This wasn’t just some random and uncommon use for the app, either. Google Analytics showed that 10.22% of users spent more than 3 minutes using Pocket Fan. Surprisingly, 5.98% of all Pocket Fan sessions last for more than 1,800 seconds. That’s right, more than 30 minutes with a novelty app open. However, the most shocking statistic was that the average session duration for the 30+ minutes segment was over 4 hours! I guess some people really were keeping the backlight on. Keep in mind, Pocket Fan doesn’t run in the background. It has to be open and visible for a session to be considered live.

So with the data backing me up, I added a background mode to Pocket Fan. Enabling this option would keep the fan sound running even while the screen is off.

4 comments on “Unexpected Uses for Pocket Fan”

How did you get your audio to keep playing after the screen has dimmed? You use libGDX yes? Me too. I have an app that has a bunch of ambient sounds, but have to keep the screen at least dim to ensure the sounds don’t turn off. Any tips would be greatly appreciated

I started writing a response, but it got pretty long so I’m going to do a blog post about it. More people might have your problem, so I might as well talk about it in public. Give me a few minutes to post it.